Tristan Partridge is a Lecturer in Global Studies at UCSB and co-founder of the CREW Center for Restorative Environmental Work. His teaching is focused in the UCSB Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy. He received his PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh in 2014 and has since taught at universities in Chile, Spain, the UK, and the US, including courses on ethnographic methods, political ecology, anthropological theory, and visual anthropology. 

Tristan’s research focuses on collective responses to social and environmental inequalities, drawing on the ever-growing global movement of environmental justice activism and scholarship. This work includes collaborative projects with Indigenous communities defending land and water rights in Ecuador, with farmers’ movements for non-toxic agriculture in northern India, and with groups resisting new oil extraction across California. Tristan’s ethnographic work also draws on aural anthropology: a selection of his text scores written for The Center For Deep Listening are published in the the volume, A Year of Deep Listening (MIT Press).

Photography

Tristan’s photography has been exhibited internationally. In 2024, with the Ancestral Community of San Isidro in highland Ecuador, he published a collaborative monograph of documentary photography, Mingas+Solidarity, drawing on work that began in 2011.

Previous projects include the CREW-based research edition, We Are Welcome Aliens.

Books

Burning Diagrams in Anthropology: An Inverse Museum (punctum books, 2024)

Demanding a Radical Constitution: Environmentalism, Resilience, and Participation in Chile’s 2022 Reform Efforts (Palgrave, co-edited with Javiera Barandiaran, forthcoming).

Energy and Environmental Justice: Movements, Solidarities, and Critical Connections (Palgrave, 2022).

Other publications (selected)

Partridge, T. & J. Barandiaran, 2024. “Futures born of the past and present: building transitions as collaborative projects of justice." In: K. Haltinner & D. Sarathchandra, eds. Solving the Climate Crisis: US Social Scientists Speak Out. London: Routledge, pp. 193-206.

Partridge, T., Barandiaran, J., Triozzi, T., Valtierra, T. 2023. “Decommissioning: Another critical challenge for energy transitions.” Global Social Challenges Journal 2(2): 188-202.

Partridge, T. 2023. “The right to energy: learning from struggles for food, water, and rights to nature." In: S. Bouzarovski, S. Fuller, and T. Reames, eds. Handbook on Energy Justice. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 226–239.

Graham, S., Wary, M., Calcagni, F., Cisneros, M., de Luca, C., Gorostiza, S., Stedje Hanserud, O., Kallis, G., Kotsila, P., Leipold, S., Malumbres-Olarte, J., Partridge, T., Petit-Boix, A., Schaffartzik, A., Shokry, G., Tirado-Herrero, S., van den Bergh, J., & Ziveri, P. 2023. "An interdisciplinary framework for navigating social–climatic tipping points." People and Nature 5 (5): 1445-1456. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10516

Apostolopoulou, E., Bormpoudakis, D., Chatzipavlidis, A., Cortés Vázquez, J., Florea, I., Gearey, M., Levy, J., Loginova, J., Ordner, J., Partridge, T., Pizarro, A., Rhoades, H., Symons, K., Veríssimo, C., Wahby, N. 2022. “Radical social innovations and the spatialities of grassroots activism: navigating pathways for tackling inequality and reinventing the commons.” Journal of Political Ecology 29(1): 144–188.

Partridge, T. 2021. “El Aromo Solar Project Sets Precedent for Renewable Energy in Ecuador.” North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA): 19 January.

Partridge, T., Barandiaran, J., Walsh, C., Bakardzhieva, K., Bronstein, L., Hernandez, M. 2020. “California oil: Bridging the gaps between local decision-making and state-level climate action.” The Extractive Industries and Society 7(4): 1354-1359.

Partridge, T. 2020. “‘Power farmers’ in north India and new energy producers around the world: Three critical fields for multiscalar research.” Energy Research & Social Science 69: 101575.

Partridge, T., M. Thomas, N. Pidgeon, B. Harthorn. 2018 “Urgency in energy justice: Contestation and time in prospective shale extraction in the United States and United Kingdom.” Energy Research & Social Science 42: 138-146.

More info: https://tristanpartridge.com/